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You can drive a projector from a PC.

Despite that this is the case, most people don't know that this is the case. Home theater PCs are still a geek thing.

there's no technical reason not to support properly implement them in games.

But plenty of business reasons, as David Wong of Cracked points out. For one thing, the publisher gets to sell two to four copies to a single household if the game's multiplayer is LAN- or online-only. In addition, the genres traditionally popular on PCs (FPS and RTS) rely on hiding information from your opponents, and before Xbox Live existed, FPS gamers went to LAN and online play on PCs precisely to avoid the sort of screen peeking familiar to any Goldeneye 007 veteran. The genres traditionally popular on consoles tend not to get ported to the PC at all except for token efforts (e.g. no major fighters other than SFIV).

According to the license agreement one game purchase is one license so according to Ubisoft in order for your wife or children to play the game you have to buy a separate copy for them.

That's been the case for the vast majority of multiplayer PC games for years: one PC, monitor, and license key per player, no split-screen, no spawn installation.

It's the case for consoles too, except they cant enforce it, same as PC.

One console, one game one user. This is why Microsoft limits DLC to one user account yet encourages you to create a user account for each person. How long until activation is mandatory on consoles... I'll give you a clue, it's already being built into the next generation.

According to the license agreement one game purchase is one license so according to Ubisoft in order for your wife or children to play the game you have to buy a separate copy for them.

That's been the case for the vast majority of multiplayer PC games for years: one PC, monitor, and license key per player, no split-screen, no spawn installation.

You can't do gaming on a TV? Which universe is this again?

The universe where PC game developers don't take into account a home theater PC. The universe where publishers prefer selling two to four copies of a game over one copy that can be played by two to four players holding gamepads. The universe where very few people even own a home theater PC, at least according to FunkSoulBrother, CronoCloud, Endo13, and hawguy. The universe where PCs are for desks, not living rooms.

Among all their crazy articles, Cracked has some deep ones:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

... than this one:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18530_5-pop-culture-classics-created-out-laziness.html

I really wonder if that wasn't the intent of the ending. One man cannot save the universe....only effect a very small part within his sphere of influence.

Arkhipov did. And of course on the other side of the equation are Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who's shadow still makes the world a worse place than it needs to be. But then again, imagine a world with Hitler but no Stalin, where the Nazis would have marched through a still-agrarian Russia with ease and likely won World War II.

The thing is, while most decisions made by most people most of the time are pretty much meaningless, every now and then destiny really does hang by a single thread. And the first two games do set Shepard up as someone who is constantly there when it does, to the extent that it's noticed in-universe by the Illusive Man. So changing this at a crucial moment would, in fact, be quite strange, and would certainly make for a bad ending (but would make for a fine mid-plot twist if, for example, it turned out that some entity was using the main character all along).

Then again, I haven't played ME3, so this is all speculation on my part.

My brother is very specific on the reason why. If you force people to play online, that's potentially extra sales for EA. There's no technical reason to exclude split-screen from recent titles, just a financial reason.

Quoted for emphasis. Here's what Cracked's David Wong has to say about the subject.

There are grammar feminists/genderists demanding everything to be written either neutral, for both sexes ("he/she"), or even all female. But what would a grammar socialist stand for (except adding a lot of "comrade")?

A grammar socialist would combine the two, corrupting a word like "comrade" into a novel gender-neutral pronoun. See what a Swedish preschool is doing about the word "friend" in #2 on this page.

Still I would rather have a 1940 size US government with a 1940 size budget and 1940 amount of federal regulations.
(and a 2012 respect for civil rights)

In order for that to work out you're going to need a 1940-size population (and never let it grow -- maybe some more world wars) and a 1940-style population distribution. I've been thinking a lot lately about the implications a larger, more urban population has for the American experiment. In all the discourse I hear/read, I never come across anyone pointing out the simple fact that things are very different than they were when the founders did their thing. Hell, things are incredibly different from what they were just 2-3 generations ago, when this census was taken.

1790 population:
3.8M, 3% urban, 81% white (18% slaves!!)

1940 population:
131M, 56% urban, 88% white

2010 population:
308M, 81% urban, 75% white

Look at those numbers. Taken from census.gov. Look at those numbers and tell me that they're not striking. In 72 years, the population has increased by nearly 2.5 times, it's become far more urban (i.e. more people cheek-by-jowl with far less community), and less homogenous.

Some people will say those are good things, some say they're bad. I think that's silly. They're facts. They just are. But no one seems to want to explore those facts. What does it mean that so many of us now live in cities? There is interesting work (Dunbar Rule, Monkeysphere, etc.) which indicates that we're wired to perform best socially in smaller groups. Social mores hold stronger sway when anonymity is limited.

I think the fact that people don't police themselves (why shouldn't I cut off this asshole, he doesn't know me, I won't see him again!) has led to the crazy layering of laws put in place by politicians who have to be seen to be "doing something" even if that something is passing new laws which overlap with laws already passed to "do something", leading to unintended consequences and a dysfunctional legal system which is now based almost entirely around plea bargaining (90+ %!!) rather than trial by jury of one's peers, as the framers envisioned. Think about that. As most of us don't wind up in the criminal justice system, I think most of us still have this romanticized notion of how law works -- lawyers make their cases before a jury of our peers, the jury goes away and weighs evidence, then makes a decision, etc. etc. No, actually what happens is someone from the AD's office and your defense lawyer sit down and play the bargaining game. If your lawyer is good enough, they bargain down so you get the minimum time possible, it goes to a judge, and you go serve your sentence. No jury. No courtroom drama. If everyone demanded a trial by jury, the system would grind to a halt.

What's the point of all this ranting? I don't know. Mostly I'm just venting to get this idea out there, to get people thinking and talking about the idea that the systems we have in place now (government, law, etc) may have gone well beyond their ability to scale to the size of our population. It's like any other scaling problem... Take the technology that is working now, keep throwing band-aids and duct tape at it until it completely crumbles under the load, and then throw it out in search of what works at the next level. Often times that changeout in technology isn't a clean progression -- some things have to work differently in order to deal with the increased load. Just because it's different doesn't mean that it's worse, though.

Cracked had a summary of 5 movies where the fan theories were better than the final cut.

A low to medium end PC will be able to run most games nowadays pretty decently, barring extreme stuff like Crysis.

Or any title that happens not to be ported to PC "due to piracy". Or multiplayer in some games that are ported. There are games where you have to buy one copy for two to four players on a console but two to four copies for two to four players on a PC.

You seem to be suggesting that only "normal" political structure's will work to keep a society from degenerating into chaos.

No, I'm telling you that humans build hierarchical societies, ALL non-hierarchical societies that have been built in the past have failed miserably. There is fuck all your's or anyone else's ideology can do to change what millions of years of evolution have made us. No matter what type of society you want to build it will be subserviant to this ancient part of human nature so you best be careful not to set up the conditions that will awaken the default master-slave behaviour that is deeply rooted within us all. Once you do set up those conditions humans will rapidly turn to their default fudal warlord society and any social engineer will have a hell of a time dragging them back out of it. This is why the communist experiments of the 20th century rapidly devolved into totalitarian governments, they created a power vacum in society that was just begging for a demagogue to fill it.

the 1%, and their willing toadies

Splitting society into "us and them" is an autonomic reflex of the master-slave dichotomy within you, your non-pyhcopathic wetware bios insists that you dehumanise the enemy long before you can start killing them for fun and profit. This doesn't mean you're evil or that you want to kill people, it means you're a human, doing what humans do.

The one benifit I see from western democracy is that it has a tendency to turn real wars into a war of words, since, like religion, political ideology can bond disparate fudal tribes into the trully wonderous civilizations that surround us, problem is that humans (particulaly teenagers and young adults) have a hard time enjoying the fruits of civilization because the slave side of our wetware makes us believe we are insignificant and powerless (cough-monotheisim-cough) in such large tribes .

Hmm. I know quite a few rich people, because part of my job is working with donors to my University.
*Most inherited their wealth.
*Those who didn't came from well-off families, who got them jobs out of college or funded their businesses.
*Those who are self-made generally made their fortune selling real estate, or on Wall Street (so they produced nothing).
*There are a handful (out of hundreds) who started a business (bars, dry cleaners, etc.) and made their fortune by working really, really hard, then buying out the competition, which put all those other small business owners out of work.

But it's all immaterial; it's very rare for Americans to move out of their parents social class, because the people who surround you make up you safety net. Poor people who fail have nothing to fall back on, and will go from having a little to being destitute. Rich people who fail will still be rich.

But let's face it, if all it took to be wealthy was hard work, you wouldn't be posting on /.

the new generation of gaming platform manufacturers: Intel, Nvidia, AMD

Let me know when Intel, Nvidia, and AMD start encouraging PC game developers to support gamepads properly and provide for multiplayer on a single PC. (Yeah, some genres would a problem with screen-peeking, but that's not a problem in co-op or in e.g. fighting games.) Until then, PC game publishers are going to stay greedy, requiring a separate PC and (more importantly) a separate copy of the game per player.

Casual games will kill console games the same way pop music killed classical music. It won't.

But since pop music came out, the market shifted such that there's no money in classical music anymore.

I don't mean games just being similar, nothing exists in a vacuum, I mean things that are the same damn game but with slightly different graphics.

That's been going on since cinema, if not earlier. Home Alone is the same thing as Die Hard. (Overview | Details)

I don't mean games just being similar, nothing exists in a vacuum, I mean things that are the same damn game but with slightly different graphics.

That's been going on since cinema, if not earlier. Home Alone is the same thing as Die Hard. (Overview | Details)

Ah, so you're the guy this is about. Stop whining and get back to your luxuries while the rest of us make a tiny fraction of your salary.

yeah, DUI has probably been a problem since it was possible

Phaeton of Greek mythology nearly crashing the sun chariot?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pha%C3%ABton
http://www.cracked.com/article_19688_7-horrifying-historical-origins-famous-corporate-logos.html #4

As Endo13 pointed out, PC stands for personal computer. If you want a family computer, get a console. You need to buy a separate copy of a multiplayer PC game for each player anyway.

Other people are complaining that Wikipedia isn't really "literature" because it's non-fiction, so how about Cracked.com instead? It does have a passing acquaintance with facts but its primary intent is clearly to entertain.

In fact, according to wikipedia "Texts based on factual rather than original or imaginative content, such as informative and polemical works and autobiography, are often denied literary status, but reflective essays or belles-lettres are accepted." So wikipedia says wikipedia may not be literature, but Cracked.com is.

(Note that i'm not going to argue about the quality of Cracked.com, but the question wasn't if any _good_ hypertext literature was being written ;)

Bah, the bible editors left out all the best parts

http://www.cracked.com/article_18948_5-real-deleted-bible-scenes-in-which-jesus-kicks-some-ass.html

Nobody plays sitting next to each other, you'd rather have your own chair and your own system and your own screen.

"Would rather" provided they have the money. Parents tend not to have the money for multiple gaming PCs; instead they buy one gaming PC or console and give the rest homework-and-Facebook PCs with some grossly underpowered Intel integrated graphics processor. (Ever wondered why they call it "GMA"? Graphics My Ass.) Parents also aren't big fans of buying the same game three times, once for each kid.

Then you can't cheat and watch the other player.

How is it "cheating" when the two players are on the same team? Or how is it "cheating" to watch the other player in a fighting game like Street Fighter or Smash Bros., which like Chess and Go are games of perfect information? You appear to be limiting yourself to player-versus-player modes in first-person shooters.

And if its a party, you're going to have more than 4 people, and they're going to be trading off

Trading off has worked well at my extended family's annual reunion from 2000 to 2010 with the various iterations of Super Smash Bros. series. I'm just frustrated that smaller indie devs can't get in on this.

I like co-op myself. But there just isn't much of a market for it

In watching my little cousin play Call of Duty series, I noticed that he plays a lot of team deathmatch, capture the flag, and Nazi Zombies. These modes are co-op, unlike free-for-all deathmatch.

hook up you computer to your tv and play the game with a xbox controller

I own a pair of Xbox 360 controllers. A lot of PC games won't recognize both of them. Why? Greed: they want families to buy two copies.

You could add extra proteins to the virus, that ONLY when present in a human cell with a specific messenger RNA, the messenger RNA would bind to a receptor site on the protein and activate it. This protein would cause the infected human cell to express a gene that would cause it to produce and export some product. I like steroids for this because they don't depend on external receptors that the immune system can detect. So suppose you have the infected cells producing a variant of testosterone borrowed from an animal, or some other steroid.

But what would that do for sports? You come down with the flu once, and later you're outperforming athletes who don't juice.

(no, turning them into zombies is probably not technically possible)

Toxoplasmosis already causes zombie symptoms, so I'd beg to differ with your assessment of "probably not technically possible".

I have in the past plugged in two game pads into it and each worked independently on games that supported them.

Then let me rephrase my assertion: Not enough games support them. Too many PC game developers and publishers are stuck in the mindset of one machine per player. I'm guessing this comes from an assumption that nobody owns a home theater PC and people aren't willing to crowd around a 19" to 23" PC monitor the way they used to crowd around a 19" TV.

your comment has less to do with the platform then the game. That's just software.

I'm aware of that. So why is there a culture among AAA game developers and publishers of making multiple-gamepad games on a console to a far greater extent than on a PC, when both consoles and PCs can display on a modern HDTV? A lot of titles in multiple-gamepad genres don't even get ported to PCs at all.

Local multiplayer used to be a common feature on PC games before the internet was commonly used.

I agree that the Internet is better than a plane ticket for remote multiplayer in genres that don't depend on a rock-bottom ping. But for people who live together, or for people who are visiting for other reasons and happen to get the idea to play a video game, I don't believe remote multiplayer makes local multiplayer obsolete. What advantage does LAN play have over shared-screen play in genres that don't depend on hiding one's position from other players?

PCs are very adaptable... with little more then a software patch or an emphasis to game makers to provide certain features pretty much anything could be made standard.

But good luck getting this emphasis across when video game publishers see dollar signs in selling a separate copy to each member of the household.

If you want upgradable consoles, then just use your pc and buy a controller.

And pray that your game even supports controllers. Too many PC games support only a mouse and keyboard, not a HID or Xbox 360 gamepad. And even if they do let you use a gamepad without JoyToKey, they make you use a separate computer and a separate copy of the game (cha-ching) for players 2, 3, and 4.

This is one of the things the Middle East is very good at. The Portuguese have a word for it: Desenrascanco, which basically means the quick and dirty solution that's thrown together at the last minute and/or from what's on hand.

And exactly who do think invented Duck Tape?

USA! USA! USA!

This is one of the things the Middle East is very good at. The Portuguese have a word for it: Desenrascanco, which basically means the quick and dirty solution that's thrown together at the last minute and/or from what's on hand.

We saw this innovation in Libya, including some humorous military innovations such as the Bread Helmet and some far less humorous things like technicals, anti-air turrets, etc. Iran saw how effective the US's drones were and they want some of their own. They saw how effective stuff like DARPA is, so they do the same thing. Of course, Iran has the advantage of coming late to market so they can get all of the component parts much, much easier.

This is why I've always preferred computers to consoles because the DRMtastic nature of the consoles quickly make them worthless.

Except most people aren't willing to buy a PC and hook it up to a TV. The cases are too big, they don't come with a recliner-friendly remote, etc. For this reason (and greed), the Wii is still a lot more likely than the PC to get games capable of using multiple controllers.

Afterwords the can google Statistically Full of Shit National Stereotypes. Considering France's military spending (which is less than 10% of what we here in the states spend, but still third total) it isn't too surprising that they're selling jets.

There's some research suggesting corporate CEOs are, in fact, much more likely to be psychopaths than the average. I find it amusing that one of the best discussions of that subject I've read is in Cracked magazine discussing the Global Economy.

There's an article in Cracked about why homemade porn tends to fail: good makeup, lighting, camera work, editing, writing of the frame story, and marketing all cost money.

at best it will bring functionality on a par with Xbox Live and the Playstation Network.

And probably not even that. Though Wii has WiiWare, which compares to Xbox Live Arcade, I don't see Nintendo introducing a counterpart to Xbox Live Indie Games any time soon.

I think the Wii-U is a cause for greater concern. It's going to be launching in difficult economic times.

I was under the impression that toys were one of the more recession-proof sectors of the economy. What kind of economic times was the Super NES launched into?

It's a home console which has some tablet-ish features.

As I understand it, it's the evolution of the GBA-as-a-controller concept that the GameCube tried

But how will it work with a room full of people?

Only one player can use the tablet. Other players can use a Wii Remote+Nunchuk or the Classic Controller. How does the PC work with a room full of people?

What will the tablet actually add to the games?

For one thing, ability to play while the TV is in use. For another, the same thing that the second screen of the DS added in 2004.

And how is it going to be fun at a party with a room full of people with a few drinks inside them?

Developers of games for Xbox 360 and PS3 have allegedly already been ignoring this market, making games whose only multiplayer is online because they can sell more copies that way.

Were it not illegal, someone would have already started a new airline to offer just that, ball groping free travel and would be selling more tickets than all the other airlines combined.

I like this guys idea: http://www.cracked.com/blog/if-awesome-lunatics-ran-airlines/

I'm somewhat surprised people expect these petitions to be taken seriously. As Cracked pointed out just today, these petitions are the public-governance equivalent of a YouTube comments thread; and expecting the executive branch to take 25k people seriously when they coulnd't even check to see if their issue was already a petition is absurd.

Note, that some of the biggest websites in the country put up big black-band protest notices on their front pages - and Wikipedia cold shut down its English site - and the executive response was a mess of equivocations and bureaucratic mush.

If you want the Administration to answer with "holy shit, you guys are pissed, we're totes reconsidering our policy platform on this issue, homies! We're still besties, right??" maybe try a couple million people marching and yelling to start.

You appear to have the same misconception expressed in point 4 of this Cracked article. Playing a video game is like watching all the takes of a single scene: you have to rewind to the beginning of the scene every time someone screws up. This completely destroys the pacing.

It's worth noting this doesn't apply to all video games.

You appear to have the same misconception expressed in point 4 of this Cracked article. Playing a video game is like watching all the takes of a single scene: you have to rewind to the beginning of the scene every time someone screws up. This completely destroys the pacing.

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_300_17-video-games-in-venn-diagram-form_p17/#4

You were probably thinking of Cracked.

I'm fairly certain that the main reason for this is developer focus (and greed)

David Wong of Cracked agrees with you. But others disagree, claiming that indies don't deserve the right to make local multiplayer games.

The part that pisses me off of? The exact same games have local Multiplayer already programmed in for the console versions, it's just been disabled on PC.

That combined with the fact that a lot of games in local-multiplayer-heavy genres don't even get ported. Mortal Kombat with all its alities is only on consoles, for example, and there hasn't been a new version of Bomberman for PC in well over a decade.

I choose option B - not getting groped, and I'll take that risk of dying in a fiery inferno. Could you direct me to an airline or airport where this option is available? Oh wait...

http://www.cracked.com/blog/if-awesome-lunatics-ran-airlines/

Or giving a bouquet of flowers to the Russian chick in the office, and she's not a goth either.

There's several others including the "thumbs up" sign, offensive in Arab countries, putting your palm out to say "no thanks", or the OK sign in Brazil

(yes I know there is a lot of overlap between these sites)

7 innocent gestures that can get you killed overseas

5 common american gestures that might insult the locals

Top 10 Hand Gestures Yu'd Better Get Right

List of Gestures

Will these be banned by the Google Censors as well? Or don't the Google Censors use Google to easily find lists of gestures that are culturally specific?

http://www.cracked.com/article_19170_6-insane-stories-magician-who-helped-win-wwii.html

And that's where we have to leave it. One way or another, Jasper Maskelyne was a fascinating man, and there is no question he helped the war effort. But the real details have been blurred by secrecy, lost documents, exaggerated war stories and the fact that time has killed off almost everyone who would know for certain.

But we admit: We want to believe it's all true. The idea that one man and his gang of rogue theater rats tricked the Nazis through Bugs Bunny-style tomfoolery? Who doesn't want to believe that?

I think the "swing" has more to do with the fact that we're near the end of the current generation of consoles

Among the three major console makers, only Nintendo has announced the end of the current generation with the Wii U. For fans of the genres popular on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, it might be wise to check out the fourth console: Acer Aspire X1.

In my opinion, some of the swing toward PCs comes from the fact that the primary advantage consoles have over PCs, namely the fact that their typically* larger monitors lend themselves to cheap local multiplayer,** has become less important over time as publishers have realized they can sell more copies to each household by eliminating shared-screen multiplayer in favor of Internet multiplayer.

* Owning a home theater PC is still atypical in 2011.

** Screen-peeking is not a disadvantage in cooperative multiplayer or in complete-information genres such as fighting games or Bomberman/Custom Robo style games.

A rebuttal to your money can't buy happiness notion. While it is true that other things are important in life, having a baseline amount of money to afford the necessities such as food, rent, and utilities will damn sure make you much more likely to be happy. For a disturbing amount of people in the US (about 46 million), they face a choice between paying the rent or paying the utilities.

So go on and tell them money doesn't buy happiness when they are being evicted, or sitting in the dark because the power was shut off for non-payment. I am sure they may have a few choice words of wisdom to reply back.

Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun.

Then why not just make PC games that support a shared-screen mode for a PC connected to an HDTV? Then all four players can grab gamepads, sit on a sofa, and have fun. The downsides are that 1. it wouldn't work well for certain genres, and 2. publishers would lose the opportunity to sell multiple copies to a household.

The difference is whether you have a workable, sustainable, working system or a broken, exploitable system.

Yahoo Answers's system is pretty clearly exploitable. Want to get someone banned? 6 dummy accounts will do the trick - their "ban process" automatically bans someone after 6 complaints. Amazon has some funny reviews, some funnier ones, but more importantly, they actually have humans check on complaints if there's an indication that stuff indicated here is going on.

The uglier truth is that for many sites - slashdot included - the real exploit is held by people who can do precisely what TFA's authors describe: running hundreds of accounts, commanding click-up or click-down votes through them or (in the case of Slashdot) farming for mod points. Evolving Slashdot policy has actually made this worse, not better, for three reasons I'll crib from an earlier thread:

#1 - The best posters never moderate. They're involved in discussions, and you can never moderate AND post in the same thread.
#2 - It's too easy for the modpoint-harvesters to attack someone's karma; you can go into people's posting history as far as you want, and downmod weeks-old posts for no reason other than to bury karma.
#3 - The hidden gem: Slashdot implemented something akin to Yahoo's completely retarded "auto ban" function. To wit: "Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton." The end result here is that the modpoint harvesters have been given a weapon - they control a "ban button" with which to attack not only the karma of their targets, but the posting rights of their targets.

The worst part? You can't ever see who downmodded. Sometimes you can see the reasons, but the modpoint harvesters get wise to the tricks - currently, you'll see the majority of modpoint harvesters downmodding as "Offtopic" and "Overrated" because those didn't go through the metamod system. Although, come to think of it, I don't think I've seen a metamod nag in 3 months... do they even have that system any more?